butterflies' ball. The queenly, luscious night sank deeper, and lovers
strolled in lamp-lighted arcades, and dreamed and hoped of life like
that, the fairy existence of love and peace; and so till, tired of
play, sleep and rest came in the small hours.

Hush! All at once came the storm, not, as in northern latitudes, with
premonitory murmur and fretting, lashing itself by slow degrees into
white heat and rain, but the storm of the tropics, carrying the sea
on its broad, angry shoulders, till, reaching the verdurous,
love-clustered little isle, it flung the bulk of waters with all its
huge, brawny force right upon the cut-paper prettinesses, and broke
them into sand and splinters. Of all those pretty children with blue
and with opalescent eyes, arrayed like flowers of the field; of all
those lovers dreaming of love in summer dalliance, and of cottages
among figs and olives; of all the vigorous manhood and ripe
womanhood, with all the skill and courage of successful life in
them,--not a tithe was saved. The ghastly maw of the waters covered
them and swallowed them. A few sprang, among crashing timbers, on a
floor laden with impetuous water--the many perhaps never waked at
all, or woke to but one short prayer. The few who were saved hardly
knew how they were saved--the many who died never knew how they were
slain or drowned.

It has twice been my fortune in life to see such a storm, and to know
its sudden destruction: once, to see a low, broad, shelving farm-house
disappear to the ground timbers before my eyes, as if its substance
had vanished into air, while great globes of electric fire burst down
and sunk into the ground; once, to see a pine forest of centuries'
growth cut down as grass by the mower's scythe. I do not think it
possible to see a third and survive, and I do not wish my soul to be